


Hell and all it’s people

by Jacobi



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Abusive Father, Bucky’s sisters, Gay Character(s), Gender Fluid Character, Jewish!Bucky Barnes, M/M, Period Typical Homophobia, Prewar Stucky, The Tempest, artist!Steve Rogers, biblical, sex on the floor, small postwar stucky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-25
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-15 17:54:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29687736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jacobi/pseuds/Jacobi
Summary: Mr. Barnes lunges for her and Bucky says, "If you touch her, I'll kill you." And he would. He would, a thousand times over. It's the story of Cain and Able but it's flipped, and Bucky's Cain and Able both. He'd break his father's neck and he means it. Steve fights against upper case G gods; Bucky takes the lower case ones. The ones that spell out Dad if you stare hard enough at them and their letters.James Barnes ends up in a place called France. In a room that must be hell. Funnily enough, so does Steve. It’s just a place. All sorts of people end up in all sorts of places.//This has a resolution at the end, I promise. Also character development of Bucky’s sisters because I love them
Relationships: Arnie Roth/Becca Barnes, James "Bucky" Barnes & Rebecca Barnes Proctor, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 8
Kudos: 37





	Hell and all it’s people

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, I hope everyone is safe and healthy. The ~sexy scene~ is toward the middle but if that’s not your speed, you can scroll through it and the rest of the story should make sense

This is not for you, Bucky tells himself every single time Steve looks at him. This. Is. Not. For. You. Some girl is grabbing at his arm and he has to turn to her and smile because Steve. Oh, Steve. 

Some people, you only have to meet once. Bucky knows he probably isn't Steve's once. But Steve is his once, oh god is he ever. So, he hugs him tightly, buries his face into Steve's shoulder and picks him up off the ground. "I fuckin love you, you little menace," He says. 

"You're fuckin drunk is what you are. I'm getting us fakes." 

"To drink?" 

"To vote." 

Bucky wrinkles his nose. To vote? Vote for what? Who's listening to his opinion anyway? If Bucky had his way, America would probably collapse. Plus, he'll be dead in this war. He's going to be drafted and everyone seems to know it. Girls are more desperate and his sisters sleep in his bed, now. Like they're practicing for when he's gone. Becca's already taken over half of his wardrobe, trying to convince herself that if she can't have her brother, maybe she can be him. Anyway, Bucky can feel it. He's got way too much life and nowhere to go with it, so he'll die in this war and it tears him up inside. 

"This is yours." Steve says, dropping a book on top of Bucky, who startles awake. 

"Huh?" 

"It's your book." 

It is his book, but Steve's gone through and drawn over the pages. Words shaded over, lines restructured. Pictures of Bucky and his sisters and Steve and stick ball and everything that makes life feel good and solid. A love letter drawn by a different hand. The book is The Tempest, which is fitting on an odd sort of way. Storms and Bucky are often compared. Bucky will take the Tempest to Europe with him. People will think he's strange, being so educated in appearance but speaking like a back ally brawler. 

Bucky is both of those things, and he is strange, but most of all, that book is one of the most precious gifts he's ever been given, and he doesn't want to die without it. He puts it in his will, the one they make everyone write before they get on a ship and go to Europe. 

But now, in his hands, Bucky looks at the pictures. This is not for you. "Thank you." He says aloud. Steve puts a hand on Bucky's head briefly, familiarly. 

"'Welcome." He replies casually and takes his hand away. Bucky fights the urge to reach behind him and grab Steve's hand. He holds onto things that are his. He holds his sisters so tightly that they start avoiding his hugs, and so he tries to relearn how to hug gently again. 

He catches Becca in one of his work shirts, lacing up his old boots. The soles are cardboard and the toes are taped over with heavy packing tape (an old trick of his to keep the rain out). "Don't you have better things to do than play dress up in my clothes?" Bucky sits on the edge of the bed, feeling like a father already. He feels like he has to be the father, since their own never cared that much. But Becca is also his best friend. It's hard sometimes, and he forgets how hard it really is, growing up. He thinks he's forgotten it, or maybe he was always grown up. Becca is not like him, she feels both of their growing pains for him. So Bucky sits on the edge of the bed and tries his hardest to be gentle. 

Becca laces up the boots and sticks her foot out to inspect it. She's had to cuff the pants, but she likes the way it looks. She likes the anonymity of wearing her brother's clothes. "I feel better in your clothes," She looks up to see her Bucky’s dark eyebrows knitted above his light eyes in concentration. He is trying so hard. He is trying so, so hard to give her kindness and a soft place to land. She loves him for it, but she doesn't want that soft place to be his own body. "Sometimes I wish I was a boy." 

This is a phrase Bucky can understand. He's heard it from a lot of the girls in school, he's heard it lamented in the streets. But there's another side that he's also trying to understand, and it relates to him loving Steve more than anything else on the planet. He rubs the flats of his hands along the thighs of his trousers, trying to find the right words to give to his sister. "They look good on you," Is all he can find, and it's true. Bucky is good looking, that's what everyone says. So is Becca, but she's stronger than pretty. She's beautiful, handsome, a force of nature. They look the most alike, except Bucky is a head taller and his shoulders are broader. "I wish I had your waist." This is true, also. 

Becca looks at him like he's crazy. "You're joking." She demands. 

"I'm not." Bucky insists. "Yours tapers, I'm a box." 

"Who the hell cares about a taper when you have an 8 pack?" Becca rolls her eyes. Maybe Steve cares, Bucky wants to say, but he doesn't. Becca is his best friend, but she's also his younger sister. He remembers the first time they went shopping together, once it became apparent that Bucky was going to be the only one to willingly spend money on his sisters. He loves them like nothing else, those three girls. They're everything. They love him back. The only thing Becca remembers is that she was more embarrassed than Bucky was. She felt bad, that she had to bring her older brother to the store, to ask him for money for school clothes, instead of their mother. 

"Do you like the size of that shirt or is it too big?" Bucky asks. He's trying, trying, trying. Becca lets him try. She lets herself revel in the careful way he asks, so she won't mistake any tones for judgement. 

"It's a little big, but it's still comfortable." Becca shrugs, pretending to be nonchalant. 

"Well, all my shirts are big so I can move my shoulders when I'm working." Bucky smiles. He notices the way his shirt covers up Becca's body. No breasts, no waist, just a body under fabric, and he thinks he can almost understand what she's trying to tell him if he doesn't look it right in the eye. 

Bucky knows Steve is in the art community, and he and Steve talk about everything, so of course, he tells him about Becca and his work shirts. "Is that weird, if I try and find ones in her size?" 

Steve lifts his pencil and squints at something to the left of it. They swing their feet off the edge of the fire escape, their legs just fitting in the space between the bottom of the railing and the platform. "Why would it be weird, when everybody and their mother knows you'd fuck the president for your sisters?" He asks dryly. 

Bucky snorts. "Ah hell no," He denies. "He's far too old for me. Anyway, I mean for her to wear? I don't want...I don't care if she is. If she likes women or- I don't. Anyway, that's not the point, I just want her to be safe when she's walking outside. Would she be safe in something like that?" The unspoken, inevitable 'when I'm not around to sock people in the mouth for bothering her' is left out. Steve still hears it loudly. So loudly it nearly drowns out Bucky saying that the president isn't his type, instead of denying outright that men are not his type. 

"No," Steve shakes his head. "I've seen plenty of gals walking around in men's clothes now. Some with short hair too, 'cause of the factory and the machines. Don't want their hair or their skirts to get caught, y'know? There's a war on, and half the men are probably gonna die, but what a helluva time to be a young woman in New York." He comments. 

Bucky thinks that there are two of them on the fire escape, and one half of them would never be accepted into the military, which leaves James Barnes. Probably gonna die. "I don't wanna go to war, Steve." He says suddenly, with such conviction that Steve puts down his sketchbook and pencil and turns his full attention to Bucky. He holds Bucky's hands firmly in his own. 

"I know, but I think you just might have to, Buck." Steve says quietly. Bucky falls into his blue eyes willingly. 

"I don't wanna die in some foreign field." What Bucky means to say is: I don't wanna die without you. Steve squeezes his hands. This is not for you, Bucky reminds himself, this is for your friendship, but this can never be just for you. 

"Then don't fuckin die, idiot." 

"Oh," Bucky has to laugh. "That simple, huh?" 

Steve smiles and his eyelashes cast shadows on his cheekbones in the afternoon light. "You know what? I do wanna go to war. I wanna go so goddamned bad, just to stomp out every single bully that ever existed." When he looks at Bucky, his eyes are shining with unshed tears. "But it don't matter any which way you spin it, in any time, in any instance, I'd never put you in any goddamn war. Never in a million years. Never even if it made my Ma alive again, I wouldn't put you in a war." 

Bucky pulls his hands out of Steve's grasp and drags Steve sideways into a hug instead. "Nah, I'd go to war if it brought your Ma back." 

"But I wouldn't ask you to," Steve argues. 

"Of course you wouldn't, and that's exactly why I'd go." 

Bucky finds hand me down men's clothes closer to Becca's size. He gets them for free, and nobody asks any questions except for Mikey's mother, but that's only because Mikey died in the factory explosion, and she wants to make sure the clothes are going someplace good. "My clothes are too big for my sister," Bucky explains. He doesn't give any context, because he doesn't have to. The way he is, the way he loves, he learned early on how to stay out of trouble: let people believe what they want and don't offer anything more than you have to. 

Mr. Barnes crashes dinner unexpectedly. Really, it's the clean up after the dinner, but he demands to know why nobody waited for him. Before Bucky can say, I haven't even seen you for the better part of this year, Mr. Barnes wants to know why Becca is in Mikey's clothes. The trouble is, she wears them well. The trouble is, she knows it. Becca and Bucky with confidence is never a good idea. Becca says, "Because I like them." 

Mr. Barnes lunges for her and Bucky says, "If you touch her, I'll kill you." And he would. He would, a thousand times over. It's the story of Cain and Able but it's flipped, and Bucky's Cain and Able both. He'd break his father's neck and he means it. Steve fights against upper case G gods; Bucky takes the lower case ones. The ones that spell out Dad if you stare hard enough at them and their letters. 

"Yer a fuckin fag," Mr. Barnes tells his son. He does not tell him: I didn't ever want to marry your goddamned mother, it was her brother I couldn't get enough of but here we are and you've got the same sickness I do along with my face. You won't ever be able to drink it off, little boy, so you better drown yourself now before you think you can swim. 

"And I'll fuckin kill you just the same." Bucky says with the same seriousness of a man already dead. There are two of them, Steve and Bucky. Bucky will have to go to war. He knows it and it scares him, but not nearly as much as leaving his sisters alone scares him. Mr. Barnes leaves. 

Alice lingers. 

"Bucky," She tugs on the belt loop of Bucky's pants. She's always grabbing onto his pockets. Bucky is tall, his sisters are not. Alice is thirteen now, and her head comes up to Bucky's shoulder, but she's still reaching out for his pockets and belt loops. 

"Hey, little lady," Bucky shifts three hundred and sixty degrees and warms up eighty, all the cold hatred seeping from his bones. Claire takes the rest of the plates, their world unpausing. 

Alice stands on her tip toes and puts her hand to his ear. Bucky leans down to listen. She snaps her hand away and kisses him on the cheek instead, giggling and dancing away. I tricked you, her eyes sparkle at him. Bucky could break in half. He's already breaking in half. 

"So are you? A fag?" Becca demands. They are walking to the police station a week later, Becca with an ugly bruise on her temple and Bucky with a freshly set broken nose. He's so angry his blood sings. He hurts so bad inside, all the time. Their neighbor was the one who ripped Bucky off of their father. A little man with round glasses and a soft voice. 

"Men like your father are best rotting in a jail cell, young man. You've got no business walking around with a murder charge on your head." He's Arnie Roth's father, a boy in Steve's art class. So Bucky and Becca are finally going to the police station. Bucky can't risk it anymore, now that he's got the draft papers, searing a whole under his pillow. 

"Are you?" Bucky counters. It's a mean, mean thing to say. Becca's nostrils flare. 

"I asked you first." 

"I just love him." Bucky's voice cracks and Becca laughs at him for it. It's a mean, mean thing to do. But, their father is a mean man, and sometimes children don't come out all the way nice, anyway. 

"Sure you do," Becca agrees. "But do you want to fuck him?" 

Bucky cannot believe his sister is saying this to him and recoils. "No, I-I-it's not. Like that." He stutters. But what can he say, really? No, I'd rather him be the one fucking me? And I'd rather sleep with him, wake up to him, than just fuck? 

"You tell him what it's like, then, Jamie, because this war is swallowing men like that terrible python they used to have at Coney Island." 

"Actually," Bucky says, "I quite liked that python." Anything to talk about something over than the war. Bucky is already a soldier, and that's the terrible part about it. His father went to war and brought the fight back home, dumped it on the shoulders of his only son. 

"I don't know what I am." Becca wraps her arms around herself. It's a posture she so rarely adopts and it makes Bucky uneasy. "I'm still figuring it out. But right now I'm just...me." 

Bucky puts his hand on the top of her head. "Becca, you'll always be you. Ain't nobody that can take that away from you." He is wrong, of course. But, he is also right. How could a boy in Brooklyn ever imagine a fall like that? Surviving a fall like he will? Or the chair? The experiments? Men are insidious creatures. Now, Bucky only knows them to be evil. He is sure in his heart that eventually, all men die. It's a terrifying and comforting thought both ways. 

He is wrong. 

James Barnes will be Cain, Abel, Adam, Eve, Satan, and both god and God individually and all at once before he dies, and he'll die a thousand times. It won't ever kill him. It will terrify him. How do you make boys like Bucky, men like James, things like soldiers, obey? You make them afraid of themselves. 

Bucky spells out his father's name with no emotion to the tired and slightly harassed policeman at the station. G-e-o-r-g-e B-a-r-n-e-s. 12 letters. He can't think about them too hard, because they might try and arrange themselves into something he feels like he should be protecting. Something he feels like he should be keeping a secret. One look at his sister's face is enough to make his mind blank enough to carry out the task. 

When his father is taken away and put to bed in a jail cell and his sisters are all sleeping under the roof of their apartment, Bucky slips out into the night. He ends up at Steve's door, fully intending to say it once and for all: I'll fuckin die over there, and it's cause I can't live without you. 

Steve answers the door angry, because he always wakes up angry. He squints up at Bucky, trying to put together the shapes of his face without his glasses. Bucky begins to say, I love you, thinks about his draft papers, and then remembers his father is going to prison because Bucky couldn't protect his own sisters. He starts crying, which makes his nose bleed. 

Steve hauls him indoors by the front of his shirt. "Jesus Roosevelt Christ, Bucky, sit down 'fore ya pass out. What the hell happened to ya?" Steve's Brooklyn accent is thick and it goes straight to Bucky's blood. 

He lets Steve press a dish towel to his nose before flinching away. "I just set it-careful," He finds it within himself to laugh wetly. Steve only looks at him with an exasperated, disgruntled expression. "I got my goddamn draft papers, but I dunno how I'm supposed to protect an entire country when I can't even protect my own sisters from my fuckin father-Jesus, Steve, I reported him to the police, what kinda son-"

"Shut your goddamn mouth." Steve's blue, blue eyes at suddenly bright with barely contained anger. This is not for you, Bucky. Oh, it's not for you, pal. "I don't ever wanna hear you blaming your father on yourself again, do you hear me?" 

"Steve you just...you wouldn't get it." Bucky is suddenly exhausted. His nose won't stop bleeding and he's going to die. 

"No, I wouldn't, and I won't ever get it, either! It's not your job to protect your sisters from your dad, it's his fuckin job to protect all of you from life!" Steve is so angry he has to put his hands on his head. It's one of the reasons he fights with his God all the time: the divine creator made him small, but didn't scale down the fury to fit the container. Jackass. "I'm so goddamn tired of your old man, I'd kill him myself, if I could. Bucky, I draw you all the fuckin time, you're my favorite thing in the world to draw next to your sisters, and your old man breaks your bones- I can't fathom that, I really can't-"

"Then don't fathom it. Stop thinking about him, he's locked up. It's over, pal. It's over." It's all over. My whole life is over.

Steve is quiet for one beat. Two beats. Six beats. Then, he says, "I'll let you go to war on one condition." Bucky smiles so aggressively it hurts his bruised face. 

"Yeah? Let's hear it." 

"You come find me again when the war's over." Steve's crying now, too, but he isn't making a show of it like Bucky. Storms and boys and all that. Bucky swallows hard. 

"Might not be in this life, sweetheart." He allows himself that much, because he calls people that all the time. And he's going to die. Steve doesn't seem to notice. 

"So find me in the next one." Steve shrugs. 

"What happens if you go to Christian heaven and I go to Jewish heaven?" Bucky asks. What he's really thinking is, what happens when I end up in hell? 

"I'm sure you'll figure it out." Steve insists. Bucky's stomach flips. "And if you take too long, like you always do, I'll come looking for you and we'll meet halfway. Just like we used to when you were working at Dead Horse, remember? We'll meet halfway and walk together to wherever we're going. But you have to swear it to me you'll at least start out in my direction."

Bucky looks at Steve, the one thing in the world that he cannot have (that's a lie, there are many, but none of them matter so much as Steve). "I swear it on my sisters, and I'll fight all the gods and angels for you, too. If I have to." 

Steve doesn't ask, what about the demons, what about the devil? Because he understands a little bit what Bucky is saying to him: the things James Barnes would do for Steve Rogers are suggested by the devil himself. "I love you." Steve says it for both of them, because he knows Bucky wouldn't ever say it out loud otherwise. That's why Steve would never, ever, ever put Bucky in any type of war, if it was up to him. 

"I'm a coward." Bucky's nose stops bleeding, but he's still going to die. 

"You're the bravest motherfucker I know," Steve means it. He knows he's the one thing besides Bucky's father that scares Bucky the most, and that dark haired, lovely boy just keeps coming back. 

Bucky looks at his hands. "I just...wanna wake up to you." That's his final request. Not a meal or a phone call or anything before the longest death row sentence probably ever. He wants to wake up next to Steve. He wants to love him and not feel bad about it.

Steve takes his hands and Bucky thinks about passing out. What would Steve do if Bucky did that? Roll his eyes, probably- “People write books about boys like you, because they think they know you. They think they can make you out of the sum of your parts.” 

“I don’t know what they would add up to,” Bucky clears his throat awkwardly, pushing down a blush that he can feel creeping up, hot and heavy. Resisting the urge to run his thumbs over the backs of Steve’s hands. 

“I do, so you don’t have to,” 

Steve kisses Bucky with a determination he never puts down. He can taste the blood when he licks into the heat of Bucky’s mouth, and he can’t imagine Bucky tasting any other way. It’s like pennies, just like copper pennies. Steve knows Bucky’s body, but he learns it again by touching it with intent. Bucky can’t help himself, he leans into the contact. How could he not? Eve picked the apple, but it was Adam that took the first bite (Bucky knows this with a dead certainty, because he’s seen his own Adam’s apple, lodged in his throat just like all the words he’s never said, won’t ever say). 

“I can’t give you much,” Steve warns, breathless, their temples pressed together, sweat mixing. The history books will try and bully Steve Rogers and James Barnes into being all American boys. They are, they always were, but maybe it means something different, to be an all American boy touching another all American boy. This is why, Steve thinks, this is why Jesus surrounded himself with all those men (and Bucky is Jewish, and Jesus was a Jew, and they’re killing Jews in Europe, they’ll kill Bucky in Europe-) 

“Whatever you can give me’s just fine, Steve, it’s just fine,” Bucky is impossibly gentle for a young man with his build and his reputation. “You’re not for me anyway, I’ll take whatever you can spare,” He can hear Steve’s breathing coming up slightly shallow, and the reality of them both nearly knocks him out. Steve Rogers with his eighty thousand defects an disabilities and Bucky with his eighty thousand and one. The one that makes him look okay on the outside, the one that makes him a coward. 

Bucky has always loved the colors of Steve. His blue, blue eyes against the flaxen yellow of his hair. His even, cream skin. He could have been a prince, if Brooklyn didn’t love him so much. He realizes that Steve doesn’t really know what colors Bucky is. He can make out the dark of his hair. Bucky knows this because this is how Steve describes him when he thinks Bucky isn’t listening: ‘Oh, you know him for sure, he’s got dark hair, about a foot taller than me’. “You know what color my eyes are?” Bucky asks suddenly. They’re on the threadbare carpet, Steve over him and his shirt half off. 

“They’re blue, but not like mine, there’s more grey in yours.” Steve repeats and that confirms it for Bucky: this man, this incredible artist, cannot see for shit. He only knows the colors of the world by the way Bucky’s matched them up with his pencils and paints, and so when Bucky dies who the hell is going to tell Steve to look at the sky cause ain’t it so pretty? “Can you focus for a second, can you look at me?” Steve puts one cold hand against Bucky’s cheek. Bucky looks up at Steve. “I love you, understand?” 

“No,” Bucky is honest to a fault. He doesn’t have the good kind of honesty, not like Steve. Not the kind connected to any virtues. It’s just the cold, hard truth for no reason. Bucky can’t understand Steve loving him, because Bucky can’t understand love being returned to him (this is not for you, it’s not, it’s not, it never will be). 

Steve frames Bucky’s face in his hands and slides down, slotting his legs between Bucky’s. He presses his lips firmly to Bucky’s forehead. “I know.” This is a good truth, a kind one, a gracious one. It asks for nothing and assumes nothing. “I love the hell outta you, all the same.” 

Bucky can’t say it back. He wants to, oh god does he ever want to. 

But he can’t, because Steve’s hands, the same ones that reletter signs, draw out advertisements, sketch the Brooklyn Bridge, flick Bucky off, they’re undoing his belt. Girls never know what to do with Bucky’s belt. But Steve does, in a practical sort of way, because he wears one, too. And in that same, practical sort of way, Bucky can bet Steve knows exactly what to do with his body since they’ve got more or less the same one- Jesus. Jesus. Fuck. Never mind Europe, Bucky will die right here, on the threadbare carpet on the floor of Steve’s apartment instead. 

“Jamie,” Steve only ever calls him that when Bucky’s not listening, when he’s given Steve the wrong colored pencil too many times, when Steve isn’t joking- “Jamie, quit lookin at me an put yer head down, you’ll give yerself a concussion.” 

Maybe Bucky loves Steve because Bucky loves Brooklyn, and Brooklyn’s never sounded so good as it does in Steve’s flat vowels when there’s no uptown store owner eyeing him suspiciously as he names his price for the lettering on- “Jamie, yer gonna crack yer head wide open, put it down, I said,” Steve says again. Bucky puts his head down and Steve puts his mouth on him and Bucky gets it, now. He understands, because he manages to bang his head back, anyway, even though it’s already on the floor. If this is what it’s like to be known, Bucky never wants to be known again. Or else, he only wants Steve to know him. 

When Steve pulls off, he’s laughing. Bucky can taste himself on Steve’s lips. Steve runs light fingers over the planes of Bucky’s face, drawing them over the real thing. “I always had it in my head you’d be a talker,” 

Bucky’s still hard, and he can feel Steve through pants still on his legs. Bucky knows how to get a belt undone with one hand, too, because he’s been almost late so many times, tooth brush in one hand, belt in the other, three sisters half ready for school in the kitchen. “I’m thinking,” Bucky says slowly, voice gravely against Steve’s ears. Steve wants to keep this version of Bucky forever. The version that can’t accept being loved, the body that understands touch, anyway. Steve thinks that is he had the time to touch Bucky for long enough, Bucky would understand love (he is wrong. But, he is also right: it’s touch that will bring Bucky back a million years from now on a ship that flies in the air, except Steve will be under him with dried blood on his nose, the story flipped again). 

“What’re you possibly thinking about?” 

“Tomorrow’s a Monday, I have to make sure Alice has her money for the field trip. They’re going to the museum.” Bucky’s bad honest. He’s loyal to a fault. Steve kisses his eyelids. Velvet. 

“You’re too damn responsible for your own good,” Steve’s laughing at Bucky, now, not even pretending to be laughing with him, and Bucky feels alright. Things click a little bit. Jagged edges line up as best as they can. Steve knows Bucky and Bucky knows Steve. Familiarity goes a long way. 

“Obviously not,” Bucky looks Steve dead in his blue-green eyes. “I didn’t bring any slick.” That’s all it takes. It’s all Bucky has the wherewithal to say. 

“I,” Steve’s voice cracks. “I got some. Do you- or I, me,” Fuck. He’s stumbling all over his words now, back to being the guy everybody thinks is just there to make Bucky look that much better. 

“I said I’d take whatever you’ll give me. I meant it.” Bad honest. Bucky doesn’t know the words of the community like Steve does, but in his defense, Steve paints and Bucky lifts crates for Italians who shoot people that talk too much (I’m not a talker cause I don’t kiss and tell, pal). 

Bucky’s nose starts bleeding again at some point, because he’s holding his breath. It’s the tiniest trickle. He looks like a street fighter under Steve’s hands, and it’s almost comical. Lean muscle that gets bulkier across his chest, and both eyes slightly bruised from the impact to his nose hours ago. It’s a process to get his fingers in Bucky, because the idiot keeps trying to slam his head back. Steve compromises. He puts all his weight on Bucky’s chest and cradles Bucky’s head with one hand, reaches between his legs with the other. 

“Is it gonna hurt?” Bucky blurts as Steve lines up. Steve pauses, stops everything, he’d stop the world for one single young man, if he could. He’s tried so many times, but he’s not Atlas. He can’t just drop the sky and shatter the earth. Steve guides Bucky’s hand to his own slick cock and bites his tongue as Bucky’s calloused fingers curl on instinct. 

“No.” It’s strained. Bucky twists his hand a little, because he can, and Steve grabs his wrist. “You feel what size I am? I’m just regular si- fuck, Bucky, James- Jamie- B- cut it out,” The thing is, Bucky’s arms are strong. Steve can squeeze his wrist all he wants, but it won’t do much. He stops anyway. “If you’ll just listen to me, it might feel...weird...but it’s not, I’m not, gonna hurt you, I won’t hurt you.” 

“I’m not a talker, but you are.” Bucky says. He’s a quick learner. 

“Head down.” Steve pushes Bucky’s head down and the tip of his cock in. 

“You this bossy with girls? I bet they like it, too-”

“I’ll be sure to take a poll of all the ladies lining up to sleep with me-Jesus, please put your head down, your nose is bleeding again and you’re making me nervous, I can’t stand it when you’re hurt, if you want to know the truth, Bucky, I can’t stand it, will you please just put your head-” Steve is all the way in now, but all he can see is a nasty rendition of Bucky slamming his head back on the floor. The bed would have broken under both of them, probably but- 

“-Most people don’t call me Jesus, just Bucky is fine.” Bucky cuts in. Steve looks at him. Bucky looks back. 

“You.” Steve says. 

“Me.” Bucky replies. His cock is aching. His nose hurts. He feels...full. Full and hungry. Anxious. Anxious like he needs something to happen but he doesn’t know what. 

“I’ve never met anyone like you, Bucky. Do you feel okay?” 

“Not really,” Oh so terribly honest. 

“I didn’t either, the first time. I didn’t get it, until he moved.” 

Bucky puts his hands behind his head so he can still look at Steve. Steve watches all the different muscles move in sequence. The human body is a spectacular thing. “Who was it?” 

“Not you.” 

“He look like me?” 

“Yeah,” Steve, buried to the hilt in James Barnes, shrugs. “They all do.” Steve moves and Bucky feels the slight drag, feels himself bare down without meaning to, like his body knows what to do, anyway (so maybe it isn’t such a sickness, the way he is, or if it is, it’s been consumed all of him since the beginning). And then Steve is all the way out- what? He comes back with a worn pillow from the couch. Oh. Bucky misses the feeling of Steve inside of him already (do locks miss keys? Do they miss the things that shove all their tumblers into the right order? That make them whole?) 

“I get it.” Bucky says aloud. Steve raises an eyebrow, halfway concentrated on sliding back in. Bucky is...strange to fuck. But Steve likes it. He likes Bucky. He likes that he thinks about field trip payments and gives Steve a hard time and is horribly honest. 

“What?” 

“I know what hell is. The devil’s always wanting, and it’s cause he’s had it, once. He knows what to miss. I didn’t know what to miss and now I always will. So, I get it, now, why damnation’s eternal,” 

It breaks Steve’s heart. It makes him furious. Let the other boys go to war and die for it, but not this one. Put this one in a philosophy class. Put him in a classroom with other brains like him. Don’t put him on a battlefield like he hasn’t ever known war- he knows war too well, he shouldn’t ever have to go near it again. 

Steve fucks Bucky harder than he needs to, because he wants him to feel it and not forget it. He likes the way Bucky blinks rapidly, the way he keeps catching his breath, the way his thumbs are probably going to leave bruises on Steve’s hipbones. “You okay?” A pointless ask, Bucky is hardly even on this earth anymore. 

“I need this,” Brutal honesty, man at man’s purest form: a needer. “Please,” Bucky begs for something he can’t name. “I need it, please,” 

Bucky has come before, many times, so this time isn’t exactly world stopping, but he’s never done it with another man driving into him, and he’s never felt so sensitive afterward. He feels Steve start to pull out, makes him keep going, wants to feel it all, all, all. Wants to lose himself purely by being overwhelmed. And Steve can understand that, he can understand, sort of, what Bucky is begging for, what it is he needs. Just once, he needs the pain with the pleasure so he knows how to tell the difference between good love and love that’s just fear and pain and his father’s fists. 

So, Steve touches him, too, but lightly, just enough. Just until he comes himself, and then he pulls out and touches Bucky all over with steady, flat strokes of his hands. Bucky’s chest, his arms, his legs, the ladders of his rib cage, grounding him, feeling his heart rate gradually come down. “Hell’s just a place, Bucky. All sorts of people end up in all sorts of places.” 

James Barnes ends up in a place called France. In a room that must be hell. Funnily enough, so does Steve. It’s just a place. All sorts of people end up in all sorts of places. 

It’s Becca that makes sure Alice has field trip money, now. Arnie Roth, who never said anything about his father pulling Bucky off of Bucky’s father, keeps coming around with newspapers. “You hear?” He’ll ask, and the first few times, Becca thought it would just be another update about the war. But these articles are anything but. They’re about a women’s labor union. Orca whales (Alice liked that one, Claire didn’t, because they eat baby seals, or something like that). Becca writes to Bucky about these articles, and they feed Bucky’s brain, they keep it full so it can’t keep swallowing the trauma that the war is trying to force down his throat. 

Dernier gets shot. Steve holds him quiet while Morita picks out the fractured bullet and Bucky, who has always had steady hands and no fear of blood, cauterizes the wound. The smell makes them all hungry. Terrible honesty. “Did you know, Dernier, they’re putting phones in everywhere back home with military technology? Radio signals. Howard Stark is the head of it all, you know him. He’s the one with the mustache. Anyway,” Bucky whispers this piece of news from Becca, from Arnie Roth, to Dernier and it’s like a drug. It makes him relax. Dernier confides later to Gabe that he didn’t understand a word, Bucky’s accent is always too thick, but it sounded like it mattered, so Dernier figured he’d better listen. 

Dernier will wander around camp while they all take some well deserved R&R, puzzling over what the hell ‘yer head’d just spin t’look at it all, pal’ means. 

Arnie goes from reading Becca articles at the doorway to leaning against the counter as Becca washes dishes. She asks him questions about them, and Arnie answers them, because he’s getting his college degree and he wants to be a teacher, so he’s building an extensive approximate knowledge on many things. “Why don’t you go to college?” He asks her point blank. 

“Because I want Claire and Alice to go, and Bucky’s gone, and he was the buffer, so now I’ve got to fill his shoes. He’s a size 13, Arnie, in case you were wondering.” 

Arnie whistles in appreciation. “Big shoes to fill, then. Is that why you wear those clothes?” 

Becca shuts off the water and starts to ice him out. “No. I wear them because I like them, because I feel more like myself in them, and if you think I give a fuck about what you think-” She’s got more fire in her belly than Bucky. She’s more like Steve, in that way, because Bucky is a common denominator: they can afford to be combative with anyone because Bucky’s got a mean left hook that comes with a reputation. But Bucky is in Europe. 

Arnie lets her finish cussing him out. “I was wondering,” He says evenly, and he’s got beautiful amber eyes that Becca has never noticed until now. “I was just wondering, because I have a few shirts that shrunk in the wash, and they’d look better on you than me, which probably goes without saying. Do you want them?” 

“You’re not gonna ask if I like women?” Becca has only ever taken clothes from her brother, and she refuses to be connected to a man who doesn’t have innocent intentions. “Because I don’t, actually, I really just wear these clothes because I feel so much better in them than dresses, but even if I did,” 

“Even if you did,” Arnie talks over her before he can lose his nerve. “It wouldn’t matter much, because all I’m offering are the shirts, if you want them.” 

Becca accepts the shirts and they’re nicer, better quality than the hand me downs she usually gets, because Arnie’s whole family is truly Jewish, Jewish as in his mother and father are both Jewish and his father runs a jewelry store (Becca hates this stereotype because of how it’s been perverted; it used to be a mark of quality, the Jewish jewelry stores). “Thanks.” She says, and she also wants to ask: how’s your father? She doesn’t. She doesn’t get the chance. 

“I’m 4-F, ‘cause my vision’s so shit,” Arnie touches his coke-bottle glasses that take away from his beautiful eyes, his even, square jaw, his curly dark hair. “But I think you’re a knock out, movie start knock out, I mean, so I guess you can take that however you want cause I know you will, and you can hit me, too, but lemme take my glasses off first. The prescriptions’ ridiculously expensive.” He takes off his glasses and puts them in his shirt pocket. 

Becca kisses him on the mouth, instead, right there in the hallway of their building. Arnie blinks slowly. “Well, I can see you just fine when you’re this close, and I’m happy to report my original thoughts were true.” He grins. It makes Becca laugh, and that’s all that matters. That’s all that’s ever mattered. 

“I’m only half Jewish, and also, I have a brain and a soul besides just a body.” 

“Thank god,” Arnie says. “I can’t stand it when the conversation gets boring. I’ll bring you food at seven. It’ll be kosher, I hope that’s alright.” What he’s really asking is, am I enough for you? Am I enough, even though I’m nearly blind, even though my religion is so much a part of my identity that I couldn’t imagine forcing it on somebody else? Even though I’m studying to be a teacher but you’re smarter than I’ll ever be? 

“You’ll bring me food?” Becca’s eyebrows knit and she looks so much like Bucky in that moment that Arnie feels like he needs to look over his shoulder for her older brother gearing up to throw him down the four flights of stairs. 

“Yeah, I can’t take you out, since you’ve got your sisters, right? Or at least not yet, not tonight, but I’ll bring you all dinner so you don’t have to cook. It’s just that it’ll be kosher, is that alright?” 

“Why the hell wouldn’t kosher food be alright?” 

“You said you’re half Jewish.” 

“Exactly. On my mother’s side. My better side.” 

“Alright, already. So what do you want? What do your sisters like?” Arnie presses. He’s not letting this one get away. He can’t. He gets it: damnation is eternal. 

“I’ll have to come with you, Alice is real picky,” Becca rolls her eyes, thinking about how Bucky would make separate meals for her. Becca is not Bucky. She can only do so much. 

Arnie’s father will make Becca’s engagement ring himself. They’ll get married on Bucky’s Birthday two years after Bucky Barnes falls off the train. They’ll have all girls, it’s Alice who has all boys. Claire will have no children. She’ll go to college and study the environment and have three dogs. 

Becca’s girls and Alice’s boys will all know Steve as their uncle, even though he looks nothing like them and is not at all Jewish (he’s the half of me that’s not Jewish, Becca will joke, because she’d rather honor that part of Bucky, the part that was inseparable from Steve, than remember her father). 

“You belong to Mama,” Hannah says, climbing into Arnie’s lap with Bucky’s old copy of the Tempest with all of Steve’s pictures inside. Arnie smiles at the small victory of the phrasing. It’s not Mama belongs to you. And she’s right. Arnie does belong to Becca. He doesn’t want it any other way. “Who’s Uncle Steve belong to?” 

“Well,” Arnie opens the book. It happens to fall on a page of Bucky, young and sleeping, before the war was even a whisper in Europe. “Mama had a brother, and his name was James, only everyone called him Bucky. This is his book, this is Bucky’s book.” Good honesty. It hurts Bucky’s sisters too much to talk about him, even though it hurts them just as much to say nothing. Arnie flips a page and they look at a sketch of the docks together. “Uncle Steve used to draw, and he was real good at it, so he put a bunch of Bucky’s life all in this book, I don’t know why. You’d have to ask him. Anyway, Uncle Steve belonged to Uncle Bucky, but Uncle Bucky died in the war, the same one Uncle Steve was Captain America for, and so now Uncle Steve belongs to us.” 

Bucky’s sisters and their husbands (and, unfortunately, Claire’s dogs), don’t live to see the Winter Soldier fiasco. It’s just as well. Hannah and her sisters and her cousins are alive, though, the boys all looking similar to Bucky in a certain light. Some of them have children of their own. Hannah does not. She always got along best with her aunt Claire for reasons that weren’t spoken aloud, which doesn’t make sense, really, because Bucky was gay. Because Claire was too. Because Hannah’s own mother would have found comfort in gender fluidity. 

But parents often have a difficult time sharing hard topics with their children. They think they make these topics easier by not talking about them at all. It’s the opposite. 

Steve talks to Hannah. He’s always talked to Hannah, because Hannah immediately asked him to draw her right after her father explained who Steve belonged to. It was more of a demand. And even though Steve hadn’t picked up a pencil in years, even though he worked for the government now, he couldn’t say no to an eight year old girl. 

Hell is just a place that some people end up. Or maybe that’s heaven. Or maybe that’s fate. 

Bucky likes Hannah’s cats. He’s not a talker, and when he is, sometimes it’s in a different language. When it’s in English, he’s wickedly funny, impossibly kind. He reads more than anyone Hannah has ever met, which is a good thing, because Hannah is an author, and she uses her Uncle as a proof reader when he’s had enough of terrorizing her neighbors. 

Hannah talks to him all the time. Sometimes, she’ll call him on her way back from work. Sometimes he replies and sometimes he doesn’t, but he always picks up. “There’s this girl, woman really, that I see all the time. I think she works in cover design or something. It’s stupid, though. I’m nearly halfway through forty, I aughtta get a grip,” Hannah is talking to him on speaker phone, cooking dinner. 

“Yeah,” Bucky agrees. He’s got an accent that sounds like Steve’s when Steve isn’t making news statements for the Avengers. “You aughtta ask her out.” 

“What?” Hannah laughs. “You’re crazy.” 

“I got my head fucked with by Nazis, sweetheart, yer lucky I ain’t worse than crazy,” 

Hannah hears it right then: her mother’s brother. The one her father said once almost unapologetically beat her grandfather half to death. She likes it. 

“But Hannah, listen, cover design? That’s art, that’s easy...if I can...sorry I gotta...Lemme find the words- you speak any Yiddish, by chance?” 

“Of course I do. Is that easier?” Hannah asks in Yiddish, curious. 

“I guess we’ll see. It’s like my head starts flipping television channels, only I’m not the one with the remote. Anyway, art is easy. It’s color. Artists love color.” Bucky’s Yiddish makes Hannah miss her mother fiercely. They have the same intonations. She turns off the stove and sits down, holding the phone to her chest. 

“I thought Uncle Steve was color blind,” Hannah has to think about something else, because she doesn’t want to cry. 

“Before the serum? Yeah. But I wasn’t.” Bucky was Steve’s color, and Steve loved Bucky before he knew the colors of him outside of wrote memorization. “Are you crying?” 

“You sound like my Ma,” Hannah grinds the heel of her hand into her eye. “And you’ve got a love story I’m never going to live.” 

“I wouldn’t want you to,” Bucky looks at the way the light reflects dully off of his metal hand. He can feel the English slipping back between his teeth. Thank god. He can’t stand to hear Hannah crying. “Sweetheart, I wouldn’t want you to live a story like me and Steve. It hurt so bad.” 

“Well it hurts being all alone, too- I look back at all of this, all my life, and somehow Steve was the only one to suggest to me that if I liked girls, I could talk his ear off about them. I’m halfway to fifty, and I live with cats. Two cats! I don’t know how aunt Claire did it, I really don’t,” Hannah is rambling now. Bucky tries not to laugh. 

“Well, she had dogs, right? Maybe you should get a dog.” 

Hannah laughs with him. 

“Okay,” She says. “Okay, fine.” 

“Just ask her about color, Hannah. I’m telling you, artists love color.” 

Her name is Lorie. “Hi,” Hannah says. “I think, I mean, well, what do you know about color?” 

Lorie smiles and it doesn’t make her prettier, it makes her sharper, more defined, which Hannah thinks is far better. She has smile lines. Mischievous. “More than I should. What do you want to know?” 

Hannah is more like her father than her mother. So, she says, “I’m Jewish. I hope that’s okay.” 

Lorie gives her an odd look. “Yes?” It’s a question. Hannah is going to hit Bucky over the head with her new hard cover. 

“Sorry. I write my books all out of order, I messed up the plot...of this conversation.” This is the end of Hannah’s life. 

“I’m thoroughly invested, either way.” Lorie shrugs. “I always start with color when I’m doing a cover design. I flip through the book and find some words. I have synesthesia, so it’s kind of cheating, but that’s how I pick the color,” She misreads Hannah’s stare for lack of understanding. “Oh, synesthesia’s a condition where-”

“-I know what it is, my uncle has it,” Hannah says without speaking. 

“Really? That’s awesome!” Lorie has never met somebody who has synesthesia too, but she’s also never asked around. She likes talking to Hannah for no reason. Maybe because she has cat hairs on her shirt. Maybe because they’ve worked in the same building for so, so long, and Lorie knows Hannah writes under H. Roth, and Roth tastes like the color of coffee cups clinking, which Lorie likes quite a bit. 

“What I meant to ask was, do you want to get coffee sometime?” Hannah finds the words to ask against Lorie’s brown-red hair with grey coming through at the temples. Lorie gets it: damnation is eternal, and hell’s just a place, all the figures in the Bible were just people. 

Bucky has been a thousand people, he’s been to a thousand places, he’s lived an eternity. When Steve kisses him with paint on his hands, Bucky is just James Barnes. Steve knows the sum of all of his parts: they add to a man. Not a god, or a hero, or a villain, or any combination thereof. Just a man. 

This is what it’s like to be known: divine.


End file.
